Idle thoughts on cinema in 500 words (give or take a few). by Ian Scott Todd

12.16.2014

The Films of 2014: The Babadook

Jennifer
Kent’s The Babadook isn’t just the
best new horror film in recent memory—it’s one of the best films of the year,
period.It’s a horror film that
understands, as all the best horror films do, that our scariest encounters are
often with the people we know and love best; that the most familiar and
intimate of spaces can also be the most dangerous; and that within a family the
urge to protect one another can sometimes shade into the desire to kill one
another.It’s the same principle that
drives the stories of the Brothers Grimm, in which a child can never be sure if
his parents are going to save him, abandon him, or eat him.

In
The Babadook, as in The Shining, Wozzek, and “Hansel and Gretel,” terror begins at home.The film is a Freudian fairy tale/horror
story in which mother and son (Essie Davis and Noah Wiseman) find themselves
terrorized not by a malevolent spirit but by their own overwhelming grief for
the husband and father who died in a car accident seven years earlier.Theirs is a house haunted by a toxic residue
of anger and sadness that comes to manifest itself as Mr. Babadook, a tall,
black-hatted figure who springs from the pages of a mysterious storybook.The Babadook is a legitimately scary figure,
one that lurks eerily in the shadows of the house and is never clearly seen,
but it functions just as effectively as a metaphor for the psychic damage that
attends the death of a loved one.This
is not a film in which an external threat gets imposed on a random group of
characters who have the misfortune to stumble across its path: the horror grows
out of the desperation of the characters, who are vividly drawn and superbly
acted, and out of their relationships with each another.Davis and Wiseman are required to come off as
sympathetic and monstrous from one moment to the next.At other times they manage to be both
monstrous and sympathetic in the same moment.Their characters occasionally play on familiar tropes from other horror
classics—the evil child, the murderous mother—but Davis and Wiseman ground them
in a psychological reality that prevents them from becoming stock
villains.What’s remarkable about the
film is that we care for the characters even when they are at their most
monstrous, and that we’re asked to respond to them as both monsters and
victims.Our fear is cut with (and
intensified by) a raw emotional despair that horror rarely attempts to deal
with.

As
a first-time filmmaker, Kent’s handling of the plot could be tighter in spots,
and the last act goes through one or two dramatic reversals too many.On the other hand, the unpredictability and
messiness of that last act serves to ratchet up its dramatic power. We’re made to see that this is not a family
doing battle with some vague external force: they’re fighting to conquer the
most ugly parts of themselves.That we
are so invested in that fight is a testament to Kent’s power as a storyteller.